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This article has a lot of great points but I think one important point is missing: suburbs are just absolutely impossible to navigate for children. There aren’t even fucking sidewalks in many North American suburbs. Where exactly are kids gonna go to and play in these tightly zoned and controlled communities? There is no biking infrastructure, cars are becoming bigger and more dangerous. Boomers always say that kids don’t like to go outside and play anymore but miss that the outside has become hostile to kids. My mom used to play (field) hockey out on the street with her friends, which has become completely impossible now due to the volume of cars.
Can’t they play on the streets? I grew up in the suburbs and we played on the streets and moved if there was a car coming. For biking we biked on the road or the grass.
I think what @fritz is getting at is this trend (conspicuously, at least, in the US) toward more and bigger cars and trucks. I’m 41, and I grew up on a cul-de-sac street where all the kids played by ourselves outside until the street lights came on. That was my experience. My parents never seemed to have a worry that we’d take care of ourselves and come home for dinner.
But today, even in that same neighborhood (which we moved away from when I was 10), there are many more cars, and the rise of the pickup truck and SUV has created a minefield for kids. The drivers of most pickup trucks in the US couldn’t see a five-year-old who is less than about 10 feet from the hood. You see parents buying trucks and SUVs because they consider them safer, which is true in the sense that we’re in a battle of who can drive the biggest, heaviest truck. But to pedestrians, they’re fatal. If you’re struck by a car, you roll over it. If you’re struck by a pickup truck, it rolls over you.
The truck problem is mainly regulatory, and it bothers me personally only because I know that the Ford F-150 is the most-sold vehicle in America, and that some 70% of those truck owners don’t use them to haul anything, ever. Now I have a five-year-old son, and we live on a sort of main road in town, and we’re hesitant to let our kid play even in the front yard of our own house. Last year, a distracted driver failed to follow the curve of our street two doors down from us, chopped a telephone pole in half, crashed into a tree and their car caught on fire.
My kid’s bus stop is at a crosswalk on our street, and drivers don’t even slow down for it, even with a bunch of kids and their parents standing there. Something culturally has changed with how drivers behave. We are auto-centric here, and we design our towns and cities to strongly broadcast that.
That makes sense. In my country we mainly have Japanese cars and driving through suburbs you expect a kid to pop out of anywhere so you have to go slow and be ready to stop.
Regulate SUVs / Pickup Trucks properly for safety and tax the shit out of them. Nobody needs these cars, they’re status symbols first and foremost. Make it preferable to own a small car.
Because of this, living in a rural area meant I was stuck in the house, and with both parents working full-time it got lonely. My school was like a prison. Most of my daily life was controlled and monitored. This led to me finding escape in the unfiltered Internet of the 2000s, only because my parents weren’t technically literate enough to restrict it and I could hide what I was doing. Things are even worse today now that they’ve caught on.
Kids need more freedom :/
Super interested in this topic. My three kids are growing up way more shielded from the world than I did. I can’t tell if that will be a good thing for them or a bad thing. My wife grew up very protected. I feel like I understood reality by teen years while she is often surprised (in our 30’s) to learn just how bad and hopeless things often are. I share realistic perspectives on things with my girls but usually with a spin towards “the future generations will figure out a solution”.
Dad to a five-year-old here. I think our kids are growing up substantially more shielded, and I think it’s a bad thing. Still, as this article outlines, it isn’t something we can simply decide to change (in many or most cases). We live in what I would describe as a relatively affluent suburb of Boston with an attentive local government and a lot of resident participation. Yet what the article describes as an environment seemingly designed to be treacherous for kids feels very familiar to me.
I’m a staunch urbanist and I believe that many of these problems can be traced back to zoning and urban design shifts over time. I grew up on a 25 mph cul-de-sac in the '80s when maybe a couple of people in the neighborhood drove what today would be considered “small” trucks for work.
Today, our entire town is signed 35 mph, and almost everyone disobeys it (because the roads are too wide, have generous shoulders, have curb-tight sidewalks if any, have long and straight sections, etc.), and the Ford F-150 is the most-sold vehicle in the country. The rise of the SUV over the last ten years has decimated the safety of our towns; there are so many Tahoes, Expeditions, and Escalades with ridiculously high hoods and poor visibility speeding around, I would be insane to let my young kid play by himself out there at this age.